Néstor García Díaz

Statement

Despite having an educational background which focused in performing arts, Nestor Garcia’s career has been strongly linked to the visual arts since graduation. Since 2012, he has been working regularly within museum institutions, presenting work by Tino Sehgal and Dora García, among others. Most of his experience and development as a performer has taken place within the contemporary art museum.

Garcia’s position as a partial outsider — coming from another discipline but developing a body of work within the visual arts — allows him to introduce another perspective to the way the artwork and the exhibition context are conceived. Since he is coming from the performing arts, the variable of time is crucial to his pieces, and the way they unfold throughout the course of an exhibition. The body of the viewer and how it places itself in the exhibition space also plays a central role in how he thinks about the exhibition display.

Garcia’s practice is informed by concepts as “social choreography”, in other words, how choreography can be a structuring blueprint for shaping modern social organization. Ideology, in this case, is understood as something embodied and practiced, and not just as an abstract form of consciousness. At the same time, he filters this idea of social choreography through the lenses of new materialism, taking in consideration the forces of nonhuman actants in the configurations of power structures.

GlogauAIR Project

The project proposes to investigate the possible relationships that can be established between movement — traditionally conceptualized as ephemeral — and the object, traditionally thought as long-lasting. And how that distinction can be questioned and problematized. For this reason, I will focus my research on notation, scores, documentation, and other technologies that have allowed us to transform fleeting events into the matter and vice versa.

In the first stage of the research, I will look into Labanotation. Labanotation is one of the most ambitious attempts to develop a standardized movement notation. A system for recording and analyzing human movement was derived from the work of Rudolf Laban. His initial work has been further developed by Ann Hutchinson Guest, among others, and is used as a type of dance notation, robotics and human movement simulation.

In a second stage I will expand the research with another kind of performance notation methods that are not standardized systems, but rather idiosyncratic ways invented by artists to record their processes. I’m interested in notation as a phenomenon that tries to reify movements, a priory immaterial, leaving behind a material artifact during the process. Many of those artifacts are made to be decoded back into movement, leaving, as a result, an incomplete object. An object that, like a performance itself, cannot be reduced to its sheer materiality, an object that possess a latent performativity.

The research then will further materialize in the production of a new series of “choreographic objects”, in other words, objects that can suggest or propose a way of moving or moving around them, like the notations and scores themselves. Objects that enable people to transform them back into movement. Or at least, that carry that potential.

The aim of this project is to generate a narrative that breaks with the one that traditionally has privileged the action over the object. From the tradition of conceptual art emerged the idea that immateriality and performance are forms that intrinsically resist their commercialization. Our experience in the post-industrial societies have shown this idea to be erroneous. We have transitioned to a society based on immaterial values and the exchange of knowledge and experience. The immaterial has fully entered the market that it sought to avoid.

In addition to that, rejecting the object implies the abstraction of the subject from its socioeconomic background and material context, which results in its depoliticization. Instead of conceiving a departure from the object to the benefit of action, I try to focus on the more complex reality of our ecology, in which objects and actions coexist and influence each other. Where objects are also made out of clusters of actions and experiences that are able to transmit.

Power and agency is not something that emanates solely from the human body but always emerge as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. Our contexts and material reality allow and restrict what we can do, how we can move and what we can think as possible.

CV Summary

EDUCATION

• 2008-12 P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) Brussels, BE
• 2005-08 Physical Theatre Studies, Institut del Teatre, Barcelona, ES
• 2005-08 Degree on Contemporary Dance, Conservatorio profesional de danza, Valencia, ES

CURATORIAL PROJECTS

• 2019 Founder and Curator of Ghosts ‘n Goblins project space, Valencia, ES
• 2018 Case Study: 1989, IVAM, Institut Valenciá d’Art Modern, Valencia, ES
• 2015 Let’s celebrate 20 years of P.A.R.T.S. Beursschouwburg, Brussels, BE

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

• 2017 My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, curated by Charlotte Vandijck and Isabelle Vander Stockt, Begijnhofkerk, Brussels, BE
• 2016 The Artist Is Online, curated by Judith Engel, Julia Eckert and Paula Kohlmann, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, DE
• 2014 C’est une exposition, donc c’est un atelier, Le Sceptre, Brussels, BE

PERFORMANCE | EXHIBITION

• 2019 Re-enactment, Andrea Fraser, A Gallery Talk (1989), 1989 The end of the 20th century, IVAM, Valencia, ES
• 2019 Re-enactment, John Cage, Sculptures Musicales (1989), 1989 The end of the 20th century, IVAM, Valencia, ES
• 2019 Re-enactment, Esther Ferrer, Canon para 4 sillas, 1 mesa y 1 ventilador (1989), 1989 The end of the 20th century, IVAM, Valencia, ES
• 2018 Past Continuous Present, Migrats (en breu), CCCC, Valencia, ES
• 2015 Covers. Fiction-in-Progress, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, DE

DELEGATED PERFORMANCE | EXHIBITION

• 2019 Boris Charmatz, 20 Dancers for the XX Century, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Zurich, CH
• 2019 Boris Charmatz, 20 Dancers for the XX Century, IVAM, Valencia, ES
• 2019 Tino Sehgal, This Variation at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL
• 2018 Tino Sehgal, This success/This failure, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Aalborg, DK
• 2018 Tino Sehgal, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, DE
• 2018 Dora García, Second Time Around, Segunda Vez, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, ES
• 2018 Tino Sehgal, curated by Luca Cerizza, OGR, Torino, IT
• 2017 V-A-C live: Tino Sehgal, curated by Victoria Mikhelson, Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow, RU
• 2017 Tino Sehgal, Beyeler Foundation, Bassel, CH
• 2016 Tino Sehgal à Marrakech, curated by Mouna Mekouar, BAM (Former Bank Al-Maghrib), Marrakech, MA
• 2015 A year at the Stedelijk: Tino Sehgal, curated by Beatrix Ruf and Martijn van Nieuwenhuijzen, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL
• 2015 Tino Sehgal, Kiasma Museum, Helsink, FI
• 2013 Tino Sehgal, This variation, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alex Poots, Asad Raza and Tino Sehgal, Manchester International Festival, Manchester. UK
• 2012 Tino Sehgal, This variation, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, DE

THEATER SHOWS

• 2019 Nice weather for operative systems, Me gustas pixelad_, La casa Encendida, Madrid, ES
• 2018 Nice weather for operative systems, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Zurich, CH
• 2017 Nice weather for operative systems, Migrats (en breu), Valencia, ES
• 2016 Nice weather for operative systems, Batard Festival, Beursschouwburg, Brussels, BE
• 2016 Nice weather for operative systems, KONDENZ Festival, Belgrade, CS
• 2015 The Stuttgart pieces, Literaturhaus, Stuttgart, DE
• 2012 Now and Then, Here and There, Tanz im August, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU3), Berlin, DE
• 2012 G#$*&! / Disagreement? / How to dance things with doing, Tanz im August, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU3), Berlin, DE
• 2012 G#$*&! / Disagreement? / How to dance things with doing, Alkantara Festival, Lisbon, PT
• 2011 Now and Then, Here and There, 638 Kilo Tanz, Essen, DE

GRANTS / RESIDENCIES

• 2017 STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven, BE
• 2016 Kaaistudios, Brussels, BE
• 2016 Kunstencentrum BUDA, Kortrijk, BE
• 2016 PARTS/ROSAS Summer Studios, Brussels, BE
• 2016 wpZimmer, Antwerp, BE
• 2015 Station / Service for contemporary dance, Belgrade, CS
• 2014/15 Fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, DE

PUBLICATIONS

• 2019 Néstor García Díaz & Paula Noya de Blas, First Person Plural: ¿Cómo encontrar a Lynn Hershman?, EXIT-Express
• 2019 Néstor García Díaz & Paula Noya de Blas, Cuerpo y fitness en la sociedad postindustrial, EXIT-Express
• 2018 Néstor García Díaz, My only memory, TEATRON
• 2011 Néstor García Díaz, ‘What am I doing when I’m doing what I’m doing’, The Swedish Dance History III, Stockholm
• 2010 Néstor García Díaz, ‘Fuck the body without organs’, The Swedish Dance History II, Stockholm
• 2010 Bojana Cvejic, Néstor García, Michiel Vandevelde, et al., ‘A letter to the spectator that we are’, The Swedish Dance History II, Stockholm

Gallery